Dave's log, (German and French)

[DaveAgain]

85. Stolz und vorurteil by Jane Austen

I read this with a parallel text, as mentioned above:

1. read chapter in German, without looking up any unknown words
2. read chapter in German, looking up all unknown words in a parallel text
3. listen to the relevant part of the radio drama (3 episodes | 6 episodes)
4. listen to the relevant part of the audio book.

I'm using DTV for the German text, and Gutenberg.org for the English text but Anaconda Verlag have a readymade parallel text too.

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 78#p208878

I've got the Radio drama on my MP3 player, and I've listened to that several times.

86. Darling Jane by Christian Grawe

I read this without looking up any unknown words.

This is a biography of Jane Austen, it was mentioned by a German YouTuber, the author is an academic who translated all of Miss Austen's books for Reclam in the 1970s/1980s.

Miss Austen apparently spoke French and some Italian. Her using French is never mentioned, but there must have been lots of French refugees in Britain in her lifetime (1775-1817). One of her cousins married a French aristo who was killed during the Terror.

87. Geschichten vom lieben Gott by Rainer Maria Rilke

I read this on an eReader, looking up all unknown words. It's a short story collection, after reading each story I then listened to an audio recording.

Mr Rilke visited Russia and was deeply impressed by the spiritualty of the people. His trip there inspired a collection of poems, Das Stunden Buch, which I first heard of in a YouTube video "my favourite books of all time". I looked this up, but when I saw it was poetry, I thought it might not be for me, but I then saw the Geschichten vom liebe gott and thought that would be a good prose alternative. I did however resolve to make another attempt to start reading English poetry.

My favourite story was "Wie der Fingerhut dazu kam, der liebe Gott zu sein".

TV
I've finished watching In Therapie, and now I'm watching Lukas, a 30 minute sitcom.

I also watched some episodes of Der Usedom Krimi (UK title: Nordic Murders).

French

I've just finished watching a four part documentary series Histoire de l'antisemitisme which was very interesting. In the last episode they mentioned a film Le vieil homme et l'enfant, and a novel Le dernier des justes. I think Spinoza's Ethics was mentioned in an earlier episode too.

My next book, not yet started, will be la femme au temps des cathédrales by Régine Pernoud.

English

Some time ago, possibly after a New Year's Resolution, I bought a poetry book (ISBN: 0198121369) with the intention of reading a little poetry every day, but I didn't keep it up. My recent brush with German poetry motivated me to move my poetry book to the kitchen, so I can tack it onto the end of my early morning French reading habit. The book is almost forty years old and in mint condition so I suspect the previous owner left it on the shelf rather than opening it, just like me.

John Donne's The Ecstasy has a great line:

Our eye beams twisted, and did thread
our eyes upon one double string

[MorkTheFiddle]

Poetry for people who perhaps don't like poetry (though someone reading Donne must like poetry):

A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman ‎ 978-0140424744LL
The Poetry of Robert Frost ‎ 978-0805069860
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickenson 979-8516632860

All popular works you can probably find in your local library, or at least equivalents.

French poetry doesn't scan like poetry in English, but if you want to give it a go, a good but not easy introduction to it is Roy Lewis, On Reading French Verse: A study of poetic form. 019-815783-5

These recommendations leave out contemporary poetry, with which I am not very familiar.
To be guarded against: Lots of good poetry requires a kind of intensive reading at all times, leaving us feel we are not making enough progress.

Best of luck with your reading projects.

[DaveAgain]

German
My reading has fallen off a bit, but I've been following on with a radio adaptation of Der Ring des Nibelungen, one episode a day. There's a video on YouTube showing them in the studio while recording, Making-of: "Der Ring des Nibelungen" Fantasy-Hörspiel in 3D.

French
I've bought myself a new French music CD, Vanessa Paradis' Divinidylle, my favourate song the moment is La Bataille. I've since found out that there's a live version Divinidylle Tour that has more tracks on it

The cover design of Divinidylle is a Klimt style portrait, Ms Paradis mentioned she was fond of Klimt in one of her interviews, a music video for one of the songs on the album l'incendie uses the same image. My first encounter with Mr Klimt's pictures was when his portrait of Pallas Athena was used in Les Grands mythes.

I've also watched some of Ms Paradis' concerts and films, of the films I've watched I thought L'arnacoeur and La fille sur le pont were good.

The English language title of l'arnacoeur is "heartbreaker", arnaquer is to-swindle/con so I assume that's the root of arnacoeur.

[DaveAgain]

German
I started reading die philosophische Hintertreppe recently, but I found myself a bit lost, so I'm now reading it together with Sophies Welt, which I've read before. They cover the same ground, but Sofies Welt has fewer unknown words, so I read a section in Sofies Welt, then the same topic in die Hintertreppe.

When I first read Sofies Welt I underlined unknown words, which I don't usually do, so it's added a little something to see whether they're still unknown, guessable, or known.

French
I've been following a meditation playlist on YouTube, I tried developing a meditation habit in the past, but it's not stuck. Perhaps this time it will? In a recent video the presenter recommended viewers who wanted a book to look at Jon Kabat Zinn and Christophe André, which was a few days too late for me as I'd just ordered one by Matthieu Ricard.

I had a vague memory of Mr Ricard climbing into a brain scanning machine during a documentary on meditation so he seemed a likely go Messrs Ricard and André seem equally likely to pop up in French programmes whenever the word meditation appears in the script.

I'm reading le château intérieur by Thérèse d'Avila, but I don't seem to be getting anything out of it, the words disappear the moment I read them.

I noticed my recently aquired Vanessa Paradis CD inludes the song lyrics in the cover booklet, so I'm thinking about learning some for a shower concert

[DaveAgain]

German
I watched the 1991 Enchanted April film recently, when I found out that the author of the book from which it had been adapted had a German connection I decided to try reading Verzauberter April by Elizabeth von Arnim in German.

Elizabeth von Arnim was born in Australia, lived much of her childhood in Britain, and then married the German Graf von Arnim. After her marriage she lived first in Berlin, then on a family estate in what was then German Pomerania, now Rzędziny in Poland. Her first husband died in 1910, she wrote Verzauberter April in 1921 after the failure of her second marriage to Earl Russell.

The introduction in the Virago English edition gives us some context for the writing of the novel:

In early March 1921 Elizabeth had sent off Vera to her publishers. It was a sinister comedy, without a hero, and the villain was all too obviously a caricature of her second husband Francis, second Earl Russell. The marriage lasted three years, they never divorced but he went to law with the removers over the domestic furniture.

After the cathartic Vera she wanted to write a happy book. She knew that she had found the perfect setting for it when she arrived at Portofino with her friend Emily Strutt. Several hotels were tried and found wanting, but Elizabeth's sharp eye had fallen on the mediaeval castello, and when she heard it was to let for April she rented it at once. Another woman friend was added to the April party.

Now it only remained to sit down and write the novel. The scenery was clamouring to be described; there was lacking only the plot. On 3 April 1921 her diary records that after 'staring open-mouthed all a.m' the previous day she started writing at last.

She wrote to her daughter to apologize for her April silence. She had grudged every single minute spent indoors. 'It was all so wildly, ridiculously, divinely beautiful ..'

After she left Portofino the busy Elizabeth found it difficult at times to keep up the celebratory note, but she persevered, and the Enchanted April was on the bookstalls on the last day of October 1922.

Elizabeth was a novelist who made economical use of personal experience but her daughter and biographer may be believed when she writes that there was little of it in this 'gay and delightful story'.

I read the book twice:

1. read a chapter in German, then listened to the English audio book for the same chapter.
2. read a chapter in German, underlining unknown words, and then looked up the unknown words in a parallel text.

I originally intended to go through it a third time, just looking up the underlined unknown words, but my resolution failed.

--------
I couldn't find any German audio for Verzauberter April, but the Goethe eLibrary do have an audio book version of her first book, Elizabeth und ihr Garten, so I read along to the audio for that. There's also a short review by a German YouTuber.

While Elizabeth und ihr Garten is labelled a Roman, it very closely followed Elizabeth von Arnim's married life in Pomerania, the first two thirds of the book dealing, as the title suggests with her attempt to create a garden. It's organised in a diary format, and it reads a bit like a light hearted newspaper column.

The book was published in 1895 under the pen-name of Elizabeth, and was an instant hit, being reprinted many times.

The von Arnims sold the estate before Graf von Arnim's death in 1910, and the house was destroyed during WW2, but there is a video on YouTube of some Polish people walking around where they believe the original garden was, Pani na włościach - Elizabeth von Arnim, dziedziczka z Rzędzin, but as I don't speak Polish I could be wrong about that! Perhaps some enterprising TV producer will unite an archeologist and a gardener to recreate the garden for a TV programme?

There's also a flower festival in Poland named after Elizabeth von Arnim, and a statue of her in Buk, Poland.

French

I've been reading Tous les chiens de ma vie, Elizabeth von Arnim's autobiography. She mentions childhood lessons in French and Latin, and having a French governess.

She admits to not being confident in her German skills when she first moved to Germany, but the book is sprinkled with German phrases, so I assume she both learnt the language and absorbed the culture.

In Elizabeth and her German Garden (mentioned above) she gives a brief picture of her children's education, they had German and English tutors, and a French governess.

Wikipedia have some historal book sales information in the form of the Publishers Weekly top 10 selling books in the USA that year. Elizabeth von Arnim appears twice once in 1919 for Christopher and Columbus, and once in 1923 for The Enchanted April. I couldn't find any information on UK or German sales, but I assume she'd have done proportionally better there.

One surprising discovery in the old USA sales records was how well Winston Churchill did as a writer before WW1!
------
I watched a film called Olga about a Ukranian gymnast who moves to francophone Switzerland, I enjoyed it, UK residents can currently watch it on Channel 4's catch up service.

[DaveAgain]

German
I'm still exploring Elizabeth von Arnim's back catalogue Elizabeth auf Rügen (Suhrkamp Verlag | Ullstein Verlag) is a novel set on the Island of Rügen, off Germany's Baltic coast. Published in 1904, the story describes a touring holiday around the island, already a popular holiday destination. The narrator attempts at times to present it as an honest travel account, intended to inform the prospective tourist, but it's a light-hearted comic novel.

The introduction to the Virago English edition says that Ms von Arnim did take a holiday in Rügen, like the heroine of our novel, but it was uneventful, so the challenges and personalities revealed in Elizabeth auf Rügen required invention from our authoress.

I used a map application on my laptop to follow the route described in the book.

I read each chapter:

1. in German underlining unknown words
2. in English
3. looked up the unknown words, using the English text, or deepl.com if I was unsure.

I'm dabbling in using Anki too, I set the maximum daily reviews limit to 100, so the application suggested a new-cards-a-day limit of 10. So I add 10 words I had to look up the previous day. I've tried using this in the past, but abandoned it due to the amount of time feeding the thing seemed to take. I'm hoping that just 10 cards a day will be sustainable for me.

My English vocabulary got a nudge, with a new-to-me meaning for "bodkin":

to sit bodkin: Closely wedged between two people

Either he must come between us and be what is known as bodkin, or some one must get out and walk; and the bodkin solution not commending itself to me it was plain that if some one walked it must be myself.

TV
As Rügen is a tourist destination there are a number of travel programmes that give an overview of the island, I watched Rundreise Rügen, which tours the various sights, at the ~7 minute point we meet a British immigrant who is beach-combing for Amber.

This reminded me of reading that one of the drivers for the Teutonic Knights/Prussian expansion into northern Poland, along the Baltic Coast was to get control of the North-South Amber trade. I thought I read the trade route ran between the Baltic and the Black Sea, but Wikipedia talks about a Baltic>Adriatic route, perhaps there were several routes?

The travel programme made no mention of Elizabeth auf Rügen, so my assumption that every tourist shop on the island would have a copy is unlikely to be correct.

I also found a TV series set on Rügen Praxis mit Meerblick, Tanja Wedhorn stars as a kind hearted, bicycling doctor, not to be confused with her role in Reiff für die Insel where she plays a kind hearted, bicycling lawyer on the island of Föhr, which is off Germany's North Atlantic coast. Completely different!

Ms Wedhorn's more important role though is in Bianca - wege zum glück, where she plays a kind hearted so-far-pedestrian jailbird, looking for justice, and finding love and heartbreak, and nice people, and villains, and challenges, and solutions etc.

There are lots of episodes, and it's not the worst programme ever made so it's perfect for language learners!

French
I'm currently reading Paris est une fête which is a collection of anecdotes about Earnest Hemingway's life in Paris in the 1920s. I like it so far.

There's a radio programme adapted from the book, and using people named in the text as search terms on the radiofrance.fr website is going to provide my French audio for the next while.

[DaveAgain]

German
I'm currently reading two books:

1. Das große Sagenbuch des klassischen Altertums by Michael Köhlmeier, this is a collection of short stories/myths, with an associated series of 15 minute videos.
In my English poetry reading I sometimes come across classical allusions that fall into a void, so perhaps Mr Köhlmeier's book will help me catch more of them

2. On my eReader I have Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz, true love is yet to appear, but we do have lust and flight!

I think in Decline and Fall Mr Gibbon suggested that the persecution of the Christains in Rome, their unpopularity, was due to their intolerance, their assertion that there was only one God, which offended the non-Christians making up the bulk of Roman society at the time. I'm curious to see how Mr Sienkiewicz presents it.

TV & audio
I've watched some episodes of Bianca - wege zum glücke, which is a little like a pantomine, with it's obvoius-to-the-audience villain, and I listend to a biographical radio drama featuring Hans Fallada: Ein leben im Rausch.

I've read Mr Fallada's autobiographical short-stories, and listened to a radio documentary about his life, so I knew what to expect in the play, but it was still interesting. There are several biographies of Mr Fallada, the ones by Jenny Williams and Peter Walther seem to be the most popular.

Clozemaster & Anki
I've been using the free version of Clozemaster.com, which limits you to 30 sentences a day. It's painlessly amusing so far.

Unknown words from Mr Köhlmeier's book I add to Anki, but it's set up to limit me to 10 new cards a day, so they don't all appear at once.

Clozemaster is easy enough to stick to, but I'm not sure if I'll keep on with Anki.

French
While I was reading Paris est une fête I noted down the names of the people mentioned, and searched the RadioFrance.fr website for programmes about them. The ones on Georges Simenon and Blaise Cendrars were interesting.

Mr Cendrars was an established poet and journalist before WW1, he lost his writing hand in a battle which left him one of three survivors from his company. His autobiographical book about his wartime experiences is called La Main Coupée. His best known work is the novelised biography of a Swiss-Californian: L'Or: La merveilleuse histoire du général Johann August Suter.

I keep coming across mentions of Henry Thoreau's Walden, most recently by our lady of the flowers, Elizabeth von Arnim:

Thoreau has been my companion for some days past, it having struck me as more appropriate to bring him out to a pond than to read him, as was hitherto my habit, on Sunday mornings in the garden. He is a person who loves the open air, and will refuse to give you much pleasure if you try to read him amid the pomp and circumstance of upholstery; but out in the sun, and especially by this pond, he is delightful, and we spend the happiest hours together, he making statements, and I either agreeing heartily, or just laughing and reserving my opinion till I shall have more ripely considered the thing.

He, of course, does not like me as much as I like him, because I live in a cloud of dust and germs produced by wilful superfluity of furniture, and have not the courage to get a match and set light to it: and every day he sees the door-mat on which I wipe my shoes on going into the house, in defiance of his having told me that he had once refused the offer of one on the ground that it is best to avoid even the beginnings of evil. But my philosophy has not yet reached the acute stage that will enable me to see a door-mat in its true character as a hinderer of the development of souls, and I like to wipe my shoes.

Perhaps if I had to live with few servants, or if it were possible, short of existence in a cave, to do without them altogether, I should also do without door-mats, and probably in summer without shoes too, and wipe my feet on the grass nature no doubt provides for this purpose; and meanwhile we know that though he went to the woods, Thoreau came back again, and lived for the rest of his days like other people.

During his life, I imagine he would have refused to notice anything so fatiguing as an ordinary German woman, and never would have deigned discourse to me on the themes he loved best; but now his spirit belongs to me, and all he thought, and believed, and felt, and he talks as much and as intimately to me here in my solitude as ever he did to his dearest friends years ago in Concord. In the garden he was a pleasant companion, but in the lonely dimple he is fascinating, and the morning hours hurry past at a quite surprising rate when he is with me, and it grieves me to be obliged to interrupt him in the middle of some quaint sentence or beautiful thought just because the sun is touching a certain bush down by the water's edge, which is a sign that it is lunch-time and that I must be off.

Back we go together through the rye, he carefully tucked under one arm, while with the other I brandish a bunch of grass to keep off the flies that appear directly we emerge into the sunshine. "Oh, my dear Thoreau," I murmur sometimes, overcome by the fierce heat of the little path at noonday and the persistence of the flies, "did you have flies at Walden to exasperate you? And what became of your philosophy then?" But he never notices my plaints, and I know that inside his covers he is discoursing away like anything on the folly of allowing oneself to be overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, which is situated in the meridian shallows, and of the necessity, if one would keep happy, of sailing by it looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. But he gets grimly carried back for all that, and is taken into the house and put on his shelf and left there, because I still happen to have a body attached to my spirit, which, if not fed at the ordinary time, becomes a nuisance.

Yet he is right; luncheon is a snare of the tempter, and I would perhaps try to sail by it like Ulysses if I had a biscuit in my pocket to comfort me, but there are the babies to be fed, and the Man of Wrath, and how can a respectable wife and mother sail past any meridian shallows in which those dearest to her have stuck? So I stand by them, and am punished every day by that two-o'clock-in-the-afternoon feeling to which I so much object, and yet cannot avoid. It is mortifying, after the sunshiny morning hours at my pond, when I feel as though I were almost a poet, and very nearly a philosopher, and wholly a joyous animal in an ecstasy of love with life, to come back and live through those dreary luncheon- ridden hours, when the soul is crushed out of sight and sense by cutlets and asparagus and revengeful sweet things.

My morning friend turns his back on me when I reenter the library; nor do I ever touch him in the afternoon. Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.

So I've taken these as a suggestion from Above, and begun. I did read Walden in English years ago, but other than a vague memory about growing beans it has left me.

[badger]

So I've taken these as a suggestion from Above, and begun. I did read Walden in English years ago, but other than a vague memory about growing beans it has left me.

I'll be interested to hear how you get on. I read about half of it some years ago & found it quite heavy going in English. I do have a copy in French on my bookshelf which I may, or may not, get around to reading.

[DaveAgain]

German
I'm still reading Das große Sagenbuch des klassischen Altertums but I've stopped watching the associated videos.

I've found a new/old series on ZDF.de's "retro-serien" section, Ein fall für zwei that I've started watching instead. There's 8 series online, the episodes are an hour each, and I watch half an episode a day, adding unknown words to Anki as I go.

On my eReader I'm still working through Quo Vadis, but I don't much like any of the characters, so I don't think I'll finish it.

SRS & Courses
I'm still using the free version of clozemaster.com, which is limited to 30 sentences a day, and I've now reached day 47 of my Anki run.

I've got Anki limited to 110 reviews a day / 11 new cards a day to avoid spending too much time with it, but I find I'm shifting to like from dislike in my feelings towards it.

Anki makes me feel stupid, which I dislike. I'm presented with words I know I've seen several times, sometimes within the last few minutes, and not knowing them makes me feel like the dumbest person alive BUT seeing the "mature" cards (known words) number creep up gives me a daily confirmation of progress, which is enormously cheering.

The recent "how to get to B1 German in 104 days" thread prodded me to browse Deutsche Welle's courses, and I've started doing two of them, Deutschtrainer a listen-and-repeat A1 course, and JoJo sucht das glücke, a B1 course. I add any unknown words to Anki, and try to repeat the audio where possible.

French
I'm reading L'exode: un drame oublié and listening to a radio series that covers the same period, La tragedie de Juin 1940.

One of the radio episodes mentioned that 1.5 million men, 2/3 of the French army, were captured during 1940, and kept in Germany for the remainder of WW2. For some reason I never think of French POWs, I suppose I must have assumed they were all repatriated after the 1940 armistice.

Thinking about the implications of so many prisoners, it must have made it very difficult for the Vichy government to resist any requests from the Germans, and I find myself a little surprised that they were not persuaded to declare war on Russia in 1941. 1.5 million hostages should have been a trump card in any negotiation.

The radio programme mentioned a book/film centered on French POWs, le caporal épinglé, and I've seen Fernadel's la vache et le prisonnier, although failed to realise the numbers.

EDIT
Another reason for the Vichy-French not being pressed into actively joining the German/Axis war effort was apparently that the other Axis powers, Italy and Japan, had their eyes on some French territory, and so were opposed to it.

Why didn't Vichy France join the Axis?

[snoopy]

Poetry for people who perhaps don't like poetry (though someone reading Donne must like poetry):

A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman ‎ 978-0140424744LL
The Poetry of Robert Frost ‎ 978-0805069860
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickenson 979-8516632860

You mentioned specific ISBNs, would you say that those are nice editions? I noticed that some English paperbacks have rather small font and not so good paper making them less pleasant to read, especially in case of poetry